Documentation

Where your notes live

Envy keeps every note in one folder, called The Index. By default that's ~/Documents/Envy, created automatically the first time you launch the app, along with a welcome note that covers the basics from inside Envy itself.

You can point The Index at a different folder any time from Settings → General. If you already organize with subfolders, turn on "Show items in subfolders" there too, and Envy picks up notes nested anywhere inside The Index, though its own Templates folder is always excluded.

The search box does two jobs

Type into the search box at the top of the note list to filter as you go. Press Return to open the top match. If nothing matches, pressing Return creates a new note with your search text as its title instead. There's no separate "New Note" dialog anywhere in Envy. The search box is the only entry point, whether you're finding something old or starting something new.

Editing notes anywhere else

Because notes are just .md files, you can open and edit them in any other app: a text editor, an IDE, Obsidian, whatever you like. If a note you have open in Envy gets edited somewhere else, Envy notices and updates automatically, and briefly flashes the part that changed so you don't miss it.

How single-word matches rank

Typing one word ranks results in four tiers, from most to least relevant: an exact title match, a title that starts with your search, a title that merely contains it, and finally notes where only the body text matches. This is why typing part of a note's title almost always surfaces it near the top.

Searching several words at once

Type more than one word, like dog bone leash, and Envy finds every note that contains all of those words somewhere in its text, even if they're on different lines or in a different order than you typed them. It doesn't have to be one exact phrase.

Tag search

Write #recipe anywhere in a note's text and Envy picks it up as a tag automatically. No separate tagging step, no menu to open. Tags render bold with a tinted background so they stand out from the rest of the text, like this: #recipe.

Search tag:recipe to find every note tagged that way. It isn't case-sensitive, and partial names work too: tag:techn matches a note tagged #technology. Wrap the name in quotes to demand an exact match: tag:"tag" matches only #tag, never #tags (clicking a tag anywhere produces this form, so what you click is exactly what you get). A bare -tag: finds the completely untagged (pair it with orphan: and stale: for a full hygiene sweep), and a bare tag: combined with other terms means "carries any tag."

Type just tag: on its own and the list becomes your whole tag catalog: every tag as its colored pill with a note count, most-used first. Click one, or arrow to it and press Return, to see its notes. Right-click a tag there to color it, or choose Rename Tag… to rename it across every note at once; renaming into an existing tag asks first, because that's a merge: every note follows, and the surviving tag keeps its color.

title:word restricts a search to titles only: the note named for a thing, not every note that merely mentions it. Several title: terms combine, quotes work for phrases, and -title:word excludes by title.

Date search

Search date:today or date:yesterday for notes modified that day, or date:week / date:month for anything modified in the last 7 or 30 days.

An exact date works too, in whichever format you'd naturally type it. date:2026-04-15, date:4-15-26, and date:04-15-2026 all mean the same day.

stale: is the complement: notes you haven't touched in a while. A bare stale: means the last six months; stale:week, stale:month, stale:year, or stale:90 (a number of days) narrow it, and -stale: excludes. It pairs naturally with orphan:; orphan: stale: is the backlog worth looking at: notes that are both disconnected from the web and long forgotten.

Due date search

Write @04-16-26 (or @2026-04-16) anywhere in a note and Envy picks it up as a due date, shown as a colored pill wherever the note appears (the editor, the title bar, the note list), tinted by urgency (not-yet-due, due-soon, or overdue).

A day name works too, like @monday: it always means the next Monday, even if today already is one. Every day of the week works the same way. Write @today for literally today.

Search due:today, due:tomorrow, due:yesterday, due:week, due:nextweek, or due:month for the matching bucket, due:overdue (or due:past) for anything already past due, due:future for the opposite, an exact date the same way date: accepts one, or a bare due: for "has a due date, whenever it is."

Sort the note list by due date from the column headers, same as Name or Date. Settings → General can turn the due-date sort option and the title bar pill off independently.

Done with it? Click the due date itself to cross it out. It stops counting as a due date the instant it's crossed out, so the pill disappears and due: searches stop matching it. Click again to restore it. Checking off a task-list box whose text contains a due date does the same thing automatically, no click needed.

Task and exclusion search

Search todo: to find every note with at least one unchecked [ ] task in it.

Search inbox: for fleeting notes you haven’t filed yet; see Fleeting Notes for the whole workflow.

Search img: for notes holding an image, and embed: for notes that embed another note. Both take trailing words and negate (-img:). With OCR on, img: diagram searches the recognized text inside your images and scans, not just their names; see Scanning & OCR.

folder:work narrows to notes inside a subfolder (partial names match, and nested paths work: folder:work/clients). Quoting demands exactness: folder:"Work" means that folder plus everything nested inside it, never a lookalike such as Workshop. It's the form clicking a folder dot or browser row produces. -folder: flips each form: -folder: alone finds notes still loose at the root of The Index.

Type just folder: on its own and the list becomes your folder catalog, each folder with its colored dot and note count (nested notes included). Click or arrow-and-Return to see a folder's notes; right-click to recolor, or choose Rename Folder…: every note inside moves along, colors follow for the folder and everything nested in it (the thing a Finder rename silently loses), and including a / in the new name re-files it under another folder. Renaming onto an existing folder or a reserved name is refused with a clear message. See Folders.

Prefix anything with - to exclude it instead: -word hides notes containing that word, -tag:x hides notes tagged x, -todo: hides notes with an unchecked task, and -due:x hides notes whose due date falls in that bucket (-due:overdue, -due:week, a bare -due: for "has no due date at all," and so on: anything due: itself accepts). Combine freely: tag:recipe -tag:dessert finds recipes that aren't desserts.

Exact-phrase search

By default a search with several words matches notes containing all of them, anywhere: dog bone finds a note with both words even paragraphs apart. Wrap words in quotes to demand they sit together: "dog bone" matches only where that exact phrase appears.

A phrase you’re still typing searches as you go, so results narrow live and tighten as you add words. Once you close the quote it’s exact: "nee" then matches the whole word nee, not the nee buried inside needed. Prefix with - to exclude a phrase.

Searching your links

link:Ideas finds every note that contains [[Ideas]], the same connections the Interlinks footer shows, but searchable from the box, so you can traverse your notes by their links. Use quotes for a title with spaces: link:"Meeting Notes". -link:Ideas excludes them.

interlink:Ideas goes both directions at once: the notes linking to Ideas plus the notes Ideas itself links out to. It is the Interlinks footer as a searchable list, and it composes with everything: interlink:Project todo: is every open task across everything touching Project.

ghost: finds notes carrying an unresolved [[link]], one whose target note doesn’t exist yet (those links render dimmed in the editor; clicking one creates the note). -ghost: keeps only notes whose links all resolve.

orphan: finds notes with no links in and none out: the ones that have drifted free of everything else, worth reconnecting. linked: is the opposite: every note that’s part of the web. Both combine with the rest; orphan: tag:draft finds disconnected drafts.

Comma-separated OR searches

A search with commas splits into independent groups, each matched on its own and unioned together: dog, bone, leash matches any note containing dog, any note containing bone, or any note containing leash. Without commas, dog bone leash means the opposite: only notes containing all three.

Combining operators with free text

Mix and match in any order. tag:work meeting finds notes tagged #work that also mention "meeting" somewhere in the body. tag:recipe date:month pasta narrows to recipes edited in the last month that mention pasta. Every matching word highlights right in the editor once you open a result, including the tag itself.

Getting there without the mouse

• ⌘L jumps focus straight to the search box from anywhere, even mid-edit in a note.
• ↑ / ↓ move the highlighted note in the list without leaving the search box.
• If your search matches the start of an existing title (or, typing tag:, the start of a tag you've already used), the rest shows up in grey next to your cursor. Press → to accept the suggestion. The same completion works for operator arguments: link:, interlink:, and title: complete note titles (most recently edited first), folder: completes your folder names, and accepting auto-quotes anything with spaces.
• Return opens the highlighted note, or creates one from your search text if nothing matched.

Markdown syntax reference

Nesting sub-tasks

Press Tab at the start of a list item (bullet, numbered, or checkbox) to nest it a level deeper, or Shift-Tab to pull it back out. Press Return under a checkbox, then Tab, and the new line nests as a child instead of a sibling, useful for breaking a task into steps.

Formatting selected text directly

Select some text and press ⌘B or ⌘I to bold or italicize it without typing asterisks by hand. Press the same shortcut again on already-formatted text to undo it.

Bare URLs become clickable domain pills

You don't need to wrap a link in brackets. A plain https://example.com/some/long/path typed into a note becomes clickable on its own, and by default collapses to a compact pill of just its domain (example.com ↗), so a wall of long URLs reads cleanly. It's purely visual: the note still holds the full URL, and the moment your cursor enters it the whole address shows again for editing. Click anywhere on the pill (domain or arrow) to open it. Turn it off in Settings → General → "Show links as domain pills" to always see full URLs.

Right-click a pill to give that domain an emoji (📰 for a news site, 🐙 for a repo) and every link to it shows the same mark. Entirely offline: the emoji is a per-domain preference, nothing about the page is fetched, and nothing is written into your note.

Plain-text mode

Prefer to see the raw markdown instead of the live styling? ⌘⇧P (or Settings → General) turns on plain-text mode, which shows every note as plain, unstyled text. Your notes are always plain markdown files either way. This setting only changes how Envy displays them, never what's actually saved to disk.

Adding one

Drag an image onto a note, or paste one (a screenshot, an image copied from a browser) and it appears inline. A dragged file is copied into the vault, so the original stays wherever it was. The copy lands in an Attachments folder at the root of The Index (visible, so it syncs and backs up with your notes) and the note gets a plain reference to it: ![[picture.png]]. PNG, JPEG, GIF (animated), HEIC, WebP, TIFF, and BMP all work.

Size and caption

The reference can carry a size and a caption, Obsidian-style:

![[picture.png]]	The image at its natural width (capped to the column).
![[picture.png|400]]	400 points wide, scaled proportionally.
![[picture.png|400x300]]	An explicit width and height.
![[picture.png|400|My caption]]	A caption under the image (the size is optional; ![[picture.png|My caption]] works too).

A caption is plain text in your note, so it's searchable like anything else. At rest the reference reads as just the filename; click into it to reveal and edit the full ![[…]].

Right-click an image

Resize it (Small / Medium / Large, or a custom width), add or change its caption, rename the file (every reference updates to match, across all your notes), open it in Preview, or reveal it in Finder. Caption and width edits happen right in the note text: choosing either drops your cursor into the marker's slot with the current value selected, no dialog. If a referenced file goes missing, the note shows a clear "missing image" placeholder instead of a blank gap.

Find images later with the img: search (every note holding one) and embed: for notes that embed another note.

Still just files

Because the picture is an ordinary file beside your notes and the note holds a plain ![[…]] reference, everything stays portable: copy The Index folder and the images come with it, and any Markdown tool can read the reference. Envy never uploads an image or reaches out to load a remote one.

Capturing one

Type inbox: followed by whatever you’re thinking and press Return. The note is created, the box resets to a bare inbox: ready for the next thought, and you never left where you were. The operator that shows the Inbox is the one that writes into it; there’s no second thing to learn.

If a fleeting note by that name already exists it opens instead of making a duplicate, the same rule the search box follows everywhere else.

Where they live

In a folder called Inbox inside The Index. That’s the whole mechanism: a fleeting note is an ordinary .md file that happens to sit there, with nothing written inside it marking it as unfiled. Drag one out in Finder and it’s filed, exactly as if you’d pressed Submit; drop one in and Envy treats it as a capture. Nothing about the arrangement depends on Envy being the thing that made it.

Spotting them

Fleeting notes carry an amber dot in the note list, and the count beside the search box says how many are waiting. Click it to review them; click it again (it turns into a back arrow) to return to everything. The count only appears when something is actually waiting, so an empty Inbox is a quiet one.

That count is the reason the Inbox doesn’t need to be a separate mode you switch into. The notes can stay out of the way; the number doesn’t, so a backlog can’t pile up unnoticed.

Reviewing

Open a fleeting note and its title bar carries two extra buttons. Submit Note files it into The Index: a plain move, leaving the text untouched. If you file into subfolders, the button carries a small menu too: click the arrow beside it and pick a folder (each shown with its color swatch) to submit the note straight there in one step. Delete Note discards it through the ordinary trash, so ⌘⇧⌫ still brings it back.

Either one moves you to the next note waiting rather than following the one you just dealt with, so working through a backlog is a run of decisions instead of a series of round trips.

Titling is usually the real work. A capture arrives called “fix the thing” or worse, and deciding what it’s actually about is most of what reviewing means. Click the title to rename it before you file it.

Making capture the default

Settings → General → New notes start in the Inbox sends everything you write there first, so nothing joins your permanent collection without you deciding it should. It governs every way a note is born the same way (typing a name in the box, following a [[link]] to a note that doesn’t exist yet, or extracting a selection with ⌥⌘N), since each of those is still a new note you may want to review before it’s filed. Notes made from a template are the exception; those arrive with deliberate structure and go straight into the Index.

Show fleeting notes in the list, in the same section, controls whether they appear alongside everything else or stay tucked away until you go looking. On by default: an inbox you have to remember to visit is one you forget. Either way the count still shows, and inbox: always reaches them.

Narrowing and excluding

Words after the operator search within the Inbox: inbox: bauhaus finds fleeting notes mentioning it. -inbox: does the reverse, hiding fleeting notes from an ordinary search. Both combine with everything else: inbox: todo: finds captures with unchecked tasks in them.

What it is, and what it isn’t

Three things worth being completely plain about, because they define the whole feature:

• It only imports. Notes travel one way, out of Apple Notes and into Envy. Nothing is ever sent back, and nothing is kept in sync. Envy does not change a single word of any note in Apple Notes; the only thing it does over there is move a note it has already imported into your archive folder, so the same note can’t arrive twice.
• It’s off until you turn it on. The feature ships disabled. Until you enable it yourself, Envy never touches Apple Notes at all: it won’t read your folder list, and macOS won’t even ask you for permission.
• It only runs when you ask. There is no background syncing and nothing on a timer. An import happens when you press the button or the shortcut, and at no other moment.

Turning it on

Settings → Import → Enable Apple Notes import. Everything below that switch stays greyed out until you flip it, and nothing reaches across to Apple Notes before you do.

The first time you actually read a folder, macOS asks whether Envy may control Apple Notes. That’s the standard Automation prompt, and it’s the only permission involved. If you dismiss it, you can grant it later in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Automation.

Choosing an outbox

Envy reads exactly one Apple Notes folder (your outbox), never your whole library. Make a folder in Apple Notes for the purpose (“Envy” is a reasonable name), then pick it from Import from. Press the refresh button beside it to load your folder list.

Move imported notes to names the folder each original is moved into once it has been imported, “Imported” by default. That’s what keeps the outbox self-draining: whatever is sitting in it is exactly what hasn’t been brought over yet. Envy doesn’t keep a list of what it has already seen; the folder is the record.

Running an import

Press Import Now in Settings, or ⌥⌘I from anywhere in Envy; the shortcut runs the import directly using the folder you chose, so you never have to open Settings again after the first time. It’s rebindable in Settings → Shortcuts like any other.

The first import after launching is the slowest, because macOS has to wake Apple Notes and hand the notes across. After that it’s quick.

Where imports land

Import to decides what an arriving note is treated as. Inbox files it as a fleeting note, so it joins the queue you review and file deliberately, the right choice if your outbox is where half-formed thoughts go. The Index puts it straight in with your finished notes, for when what you capture is already worth keeping.

Either way, each note keeps the date you actually wrote it, so it sorts by when it was written rather than when it was imported.

What doesn’t come across

Text, headings, bold and italic, lists, and links all arrive as Markdown. Two things don’t:

• Images and attachments. Apple Notes doesn’t hand them to other apps, so you’ll find an [image omitted] marker where one used to be, rather than a silent gap.
• Checklist ticks. An Apple Notes checklist arrives as an ordinary bullet list. Apple doesn’t expose which items are checked to any outside app: a checklist and a plain bulleted list are indistinguishable by the time Envy sees them, so there’s genuinely nothing there to import.

Apple Notes also repeats a note’s title as the first line of its body. Envy strips that line, so an imported note isn’t opened by its own name.

Turning it on

Settings → Import → Enable Kindle import, off until you flip it. Older Kindles that mount as a USB drive (the ones that appear in Finder when plugged in) work directly. Newer Kindles connect over MTP, which macOS doesn’t mount natively: mount one with Moorage, the official way to bring a newer Kindle in, and Envy finds it automatically under ~/Moorage, so those work too.

Running an import

Plug in your Kindle and press Import from Kindle in Settings, or run it from the File menu. Envy reads the Kindle’s My Clippings.txt, the plain-text file it keeps of every book’s highlights and notes, and writes each one into your Inbox as a fleeting note. No Kindle on hand? Choose Clippings File… imports a copied My Clippings.txt from anywhere.

What each highlight becomes

One fleeting note per highlight: the passage as a blockquote, titled by the quote’s first words and its page (the map is not the territory, p42), with the book as a [[link]]. That link stays dimmed until you make the book’s own note; once you do, interlink: gives you a hub of every highlight from that book. A note you typed on the Kindle attaches beneath the passage it belongs to.

You control the shape in Settings: whether the title carries the page, the location, both, or neither, and whether each note’s attribution line shows the author and the location.

It remembers what it imported

Plug in after each reading session and only new highlights come in, even if you’ve since filed, retitled, or deleted the earlier ones. That memory lives in an Envy Data folder inside your Index, so it travels with your vault: import on one Mac, and a second Mac syncing the same vault won’t re-import the same highlights. Forget Import History clears it if you want to redo everything, say, with a different title format.

Along the way it tidies the file’s quirks: a highlight you adjusted (which the Kindle records as a fresh overlapping entry) collapses to its final form, and bookmarks, which have no text, are skipped.

Capture from your iPhone

A camera button sits beside the search bar; right-clicking inside a note offers the same “Import from iPhone or iPad”. Choose Take Photo or Scan Documents and your phone captures it (Continuity Camera). A photo becomes a fresh note titled by the date; a scanned document comes in cropped to the page and straightened, one image per page. Turn the crop off in Settings → Import → Camera & Scanning if you’d rather keep the scanner’s framing.

Search the text inside images

Turn on Read text in images (OCR) and Envy reads your photos and scans in the background. Then img: whiteboard searches the text of your images; with Include image text in every search on, a plain search like receipt reaches them too, no operator needed. Open a matching note and the words light up right on the picture. Printed pages, whiteboards, and receipts read cleanly; handwriting is a coin flip, but search still wins at partial accuracy.

Select and lift text off an image

Drag across the text on any image to select it (Live Text) and press ⌘C to copy. Or right-click the image: Copy Text from Image puts the whole thing on the clipboard, and Transcribe Text into Note drops it in as plain text below the picture, turning a scanned page into words you can edit and link.

Pinning

Right-click a note (or press ⌥⌘P with it selected) to pin it. Pinned notes stay at the top of the list regardless of which column you've sorted by, marked with a small pin icon.

Pinning never overrides search. A pinned note that doesn't match your current search is still hidden, exactly like any other note. It only affects ordering among whatever a search has already matched.

Tags in the title bar, and coloring them

Turn on "Show tags in title bar" in Settings → General and a note's #tags show as chips next to its title. Click one to search tag:whatever; the note you clicked from stays open, so you don't lose your place. When a note carries more than a couple of tags, the chips wrap onto their own rows rather than squeezing together.

Right-click a tag chip to give that tag a color: a few presets, or any color you like. Every note that carries the tag shows it in that color, because the color belongs to the tag, not the note. It's a preference, so the #tag in your file is untouched and stays portable; open the vault elsewhere and the tag still sorts, just without the tint.

Tags complete themselves as you type, too. Start a #tag in any note and the rest of an existing tag appears in grey at your cursor, your most-used match first, the same ghost text a [[link]] offers. Press ⇥ or → to accept it, or just keep typing to make a new tag.

Splitting a note in two

A note grows until it's really holding two ideas. Select the part that wants to stand on its own and press ⌥⌘N and it becomes a note of its own, with a [[link]] left in its place. The new note's title is taken from the selection's first line (markers like # or - stripped off), and if that line is too long to be a filename it's shortened while the full text stays in the body, so nothing is ever lost. It's the daily move of a slipbox: one idea per note, applied to writing that has outgrown itself. Also under File → Extract Selection to New Note.

Sorting and selecting

Click Name or Date above the note list to sort by it, and Due too, once any note has an @ date (toggle it off in Settings → General if you'd rather not see it). Click the same column again to reverse the direction.

Cmd-click notes in the list to select several at once. Shift-click extends the selection to every note between your last click and the new one. With more than one note selected, the right-click menu offers bulk actions: open in Finder, or delete.

Renaming a note

Click a note's title bar to rename it, or right-click it in the list. When you rename a note, every [[link]] and ![[embed]] pointing to it across all your other notes is rewritten to the new name automatically, so nothing breaks. The notes whose links changed keep their modified dates, so renaming a widely-linked note doesn't shuffle a date-sorted list.

Interlinks

Click the interlinks count in the footer, or press ⌘⇧B, to expand the panel that shows every note connected to the one you're viewing, opening upward from the footer. Three sections sit side by side (and stack when the pane is narrow): the notes it links out to, the notes that link back to it, and Suggested links: other notes you've mentioned by name but haven't linked yet, each with a one-click button to wrap the mention in [[ ]]. Toggle "Show interlinks in footer" in Settings → General to hide it.

Naming a link whatever you want

A plain [[Note Title]] puts the note’s filename in the middle of your sentence, which is fine in a list and awkward in prose. Add a pipe and your own words instead: [[2026-07-18 Standup|yesterday’s standup]] reads as yesterday’s standup and still points at the same note. Only your words show; the target and the pipe fold away like the brackets do, and reappear when the cursor enters the link or you hover it.

This survives a rename. Rename the note and Envy rewrites the target across your whole Index while leaving your wording untouched. The sentence you wrote is yours, not something the filename gets to edit.

A link is ordinary text, so you can work inside it. Click a link the cursor is already in and the caret lands where you clicked instead of following the link, and the whole span (brackets included) is clickable once it’s expanded.

Links to a heading

[[Note Title#Heading]] resolves to the note. Envy doesn’t scroll to the heading yet, but it reads the reference correctly rather than hunting for a note named “Note Title#Heading”, so the link works, the backlink registers, and a rename tracks it. Notes carried over from an app that does support heading links keep working, and keep their references intact for when Envy supports them too.

Peeking at linked notes & pinned floating notes

Option-click any [[wiki-link]] (in the editor or in the interlinks panel) to open a small floating preview of that note instead of navigating away. It opens read-only at first; click into it to edit right there. Settings → General → "Preview linked notes" can change the trigger or turn it off, if you'd rather Option-click do nothing special.

Pin a peek to keep it. Click the pin in the peek's corner and it becomes its own free-standing floating note: open as many as you like. Drag any edge to resize (the size is remembered for the next one), drag the body to move it, and click the filled pin to close it. Floating notes tuck themselves away when you switch to another app and come back when you return to Envy.

Pop Out. You can also skip the peek entirely: right-click any note in the list and choose Pop Out to open it straight into a floating window, handy for keeping a reference note in view while you write in the main editor. Edits made in a floating note and the main editor stay in sync; whichever window you click away from commits its changes first.

Embedding a note inside another

Write ![[Note Title]] anywhere (alone on its own line or mid-sentence) and that note's live content shows up right underneath instead of just a link to it. The blank line it needs underneath is inserted automatically, no need to leave one yourself. Edit the source note anywhere (directly, or through the embed itself) and every place it's embedded reflects the change immediately, no manual refresh.

The ![[Note Title]] marker stays visible above the embed, reading as an ordinary link: click into it to edit the title, or delete the line to remove the embed (it turns back into whatever's left once the ! or the whole line is gone). The embedded note itself is marked by a quiet rule down its left edge, sized to the note's own length, the same way a blockquote is: a quote and a transclusion are both text from somewhere else.

The embed starts read-only, the same as a linked-note preview. Click into it to edit that note directly, and edits save straight back to it, not to the note you're looking at. An embed won't expand another embed inside itself (it renders as a plain link instead), and a note can't embed itself.

Deleting and restoring

⌘⌫ deletes the selected note. It goes to a Trash folder at the root of your Index first, not gone for good. Inside, Trash mirrors your folder structure (Trash/Work/note.md came from Work/), so a restore always lands back exactly where it came from. Being a visible folder, it syncs with your notes too: a delete on one machine is recoverable from another. ⌘⇧⌫ restores the note (or notes, if you deleted several at once) right back where they were.

Search trash: to browse everything currently trashed anywhere in The Index, without leaving the search box. Clicking or arrowing through results just previews them, read-only; Restore, Reveal in Finder, and Delete are always a right-click (or a button right there in the preview pane) away, never a side effect of looking.

The Trash folder gets swept into the real macOS Trash on a schedule you control from Settings → General → Trash: "Empty every" a number of days, weeks, or months (30 days by default). There's also a "Reveal Trash Folder in Finder" shortcut there.

What's in the Index

The Index is a plain folder of .md files. A few subfolders inside it have special meaning, and the rest are yours:

• The root: notes that live directly in the Index, not filed into anything.
• Inbox/: fleeting notes, waiting to be reviewed and filed (see Fleeting Notes). Marked with an amber dot in the list.
• Templates/: note templates, never treated as notes themselves.
• Trash/: recently deleted notes, mirroring the folder each came from, swept out on a schedule.
• Attachments/: the images your notes embed.
• Any other subfolders you make: your own categories. Make them in Finder or from inside Envy; they're just folders. (The four names above are reserved at the root.)

Seeing notes in subfolders

By default Envy lists only the notes at the top level of your Index. Turn on Settings → General → "Show items in subfolders" and it also picks up notes nested inside your folders, all in the one flat list. Everything folder-related below (colors, the move menu) only appears when this is on; with it off, subfolders simply don't factor in.

Folder colors

With subfolder scanning on, every folder has a color from the moment it exists, and every note inside it shows a dot in that color in the list, so you can see the shape of your collection at a glance, which pile each note belongs to, without opening anything. Hover a dot and it names its folder; click it to see just that folder's notes (it runs a folder: search, so clearing the search box brings everything back); right-click it (or the name chip) to pick the color you actually want: the palette presets, a custom color, the same menu a tag offers. (An Inbox note is marked with an amber ! instead; that's the one folder that stays special.)

The open note names its folder too: a chip beside its title in the folder's color, a small folder glyph in an outlined capsule so it can't be mistaken for a tag chip. Click it for the same folder search, or right-click it to recolor the folder, the same menu the list's dot offers. It never shows for notes at the Index root, and Settings → General → "Show folder in title bar" hides it entirely.

Prefer names to dots? Settings → General → Note List → "Show a note's folder as" switches the marker between a colored dot (the default), the folder's name as a small chip, or nothing at all.

The color is a preference keyed to the folder, not something written into your notes. The category itself (which folder a note is in) lives on disk and is fully portable; only the tint is Envy's. Open the Index in another app and your notes are still sorted into folders, just uncolored.

Filing a note into a folder

Right-click a note and choose Move to →: The Index to pull it back out to the root, any subfolder (shown with its color swatch), or New Folder… to make one on the spot and move the note straight into it. Works on a multi-selection too: Move N Notes to files them all at once. It's a real file move, and the note's title doesn't change, so every [[link]] pointing at it still resolves. Nothing is written into the note; its folder is its category.

You can also file at birth, straight from the search box: type a folder path, a slash, and a title (Work/Quarterly plan) and press Return. The note is created already inside that folder, and the folder itself is created first if it doesn't exist yet. Nested paths work too (Work/Clients/Kickoff), and the hint pill under the search box shows exactly where the note will land before you commit.

Folders or tags?

Both, if you like; they're different axes. A note lives in exactly one folder, which makes folders good for a single "which pile is this" question. Tags are many-to-many: a note can carry as many as you want, cutting across folders. Colored folders answer "where does this belong," colored tags answer "what is this about," and a note can do both at once.

Using a template

template:daily filters by name as you type, matching anywhere in the template's title, same as a regular search. Click one (or arrow to it with ↑ / ↓) to open it, live and editable, right there in the editor pane: same click-to-open feel as any regular note, changes save automatically, no separate "start editing" step.

Creating a new note from a template is its own deliberate action: press Return on the highlighted match, click Create Note from Template right in the editor pane's own header, or right-click a template for the same option. Just opening one to look at or edit it never spins off a note by itself.

⌘⇧N drops template: straight into the search box for you.

Creating a template

Type template: followed by a name that doesn't match anything yet, and Envy offers to create it: press Return and it's highlighted immediately, ready to write. You can also right-click any existing note and choose Make This Note a Template to turn it into one on the spot.

Deleting and moving templates back

Right-click a template in the template: list for Create Note from Template, Reveal in Finder, Move Back to Notes List (turns it back into a regular note; moved accidentally? this undoes it), and Delete (goes to Trash, not gone for good).

Filling in the date, time, and title automatically

{{date}}, {{time}}, and {{title}} anywhere in a template, including in its own name, are filled in the moment a note is created from it. A template literally named Daily Notes {{date}} produces a note titled with today's actual date, not the literal token.

{{date}}'s format is a free-text pattern in Settings → General → Templates, using macOS's native date tokens (yyyy, MM, dd, MMMM, EEEE, and so on) rather than a fixed list of choices, with a live preview as you type. MMMM d, yyyy gives "July 11, 2026"; yyyy-MM-dd gives "2026-07-11". Whatever suits you.

Where templates live

Templates live in a Templates subfolder inside The Index. They never show up in search, the note list, or backlinks; they're only ever visible through template:.

Three starter templates (Daily Notes, To-Do List, and Study Notes) are created automatically the first time you use the feature, as a starting point you're free to edit or delete.

Layout

⌘⇧L toggles between two layouts: the note list stacked above the editor, or side by side. Whichever divider position you leave it at is remembered.

Fonts, zoom, and density

Pick any font installed on your Mac, and a base size that suits you. Independent of that saved size, ⌘+ and ⌘- zoom the editor text larger or smaller on the fly, and ⌘0 resets it, all without touching your saved preference.

An Interface Text Size slider scales the rest of the app's chrome (the note list, search bar, footer, and so on) separately from the editor's own text, so you can size the interface and your writing independently.

Vault totals in the footer

The editor's footer shows how many notes and folders your vault holds, just right of the open note's word and character counts, behind a small divider so the two kinds of number stay distinct. Fleeting notes count; Templates and Trash never do, and the folder count only appears with subfolder scanning on. Settings → General → "Show note and folder counts in footer" turns it off.

A note list density setting controls how much vertical space each row takes up, and a separate toggle shows or hides a one-line content preview under each note's title. Another toggle shows each note's last-modified date next to its title, on by default, with a choice of relative, absolute, or smart formatting.

Color

Nearly every color in Envy is independently customizable once you turn on a custom theme: the editor's text and background, marker characters, links, inline code background, tag text and tag background, the note list's own highlight color, and its background and text color if you want it to stand apart from the editor entirely.

Search-match highlighting and the note list's selection color are customizable too, independent of whether a custom theme is turned on.

Translucency and mode

A blur strength control adjusts how translucent the window's background is. A separate mode setting follows System, or locks to Light or Dark, independent of any custom colors you've picked.

Focus highlight

Moving keyboard focus between the search box, note list, and editor, whether by clicking or with ⌥↓ / ⌥↑, highlights whichever one is active with a border. Its color and thickness are both customizable, and a toggle controls whether the border stays as long as it's focused or fades away after a moment.

Notes

Search & Navigation

Window & Layout

Font

Global

Standard

The global hotkey

⌥⌘↩ shows or hides Envy from anywhere on your Mac, even when a completely different app is focused. A menu bar icon does the same thing on a single click, unless a note is pinned to the menu bar, in which case a click opens that note instead. If you've pinned a note, ⌥⌘↓ shows or hides it the same way, independent of the main window.

One exception: while Envy is in full screen, clicking the menu bar icon never hides it (hiding a full-screen window would strand its empty space). The click just brings Envy front, jumping to its space if you clicked from another one. The hotkey keeps its full toggle everywhere.

The menu bar icon's right-click menu

Right-click the menu bar icon for quick access to a new note, a new pinned note (optionally from a template), "Unpin Note" (only enabled when a note is actually pinned), "Keep Envy on Top", Settings, or Quit, without needing to bring the main window forward first.

Keep Envy on Top

Right-click the menu bar icon → Keep Envy on Top (a checkmark shows when it's active) and the whole window floats above every other app's windows until you toggle it off: the whole-app version of pinning a peek, for transcribing or referencing while you work elsewhere. ⌥⌘T flips it from anywhere, rebindable in Settings → Shortcuts, and the choice survives relaunches.

While it's on, the pin wins over "hide Envy when clicking another app" (the two are opposites); unpin and auto-hide behaves as configured again. Deliberate hiding, the summon hotkey or a menu bar click, still works either way.

Pin a note to the menu bar

Right-click any note and choose "Pin to Menu Bar." From then on, clicking the menu bar icon opens that note in a small, resizable, editable popup instead of the full app, good for a running to-do list or a reminder you want one click away. Unpin it again from the note's own right-click menu, the menu bar icon's right-click menu ("Unpin Note"), or ⌥⌘⇧P from anywhere.

The popup remembers its own size, has its own font zoom (⌘+ / ⌘- / ⌘0) independent of the main editor, a pin button to keep it open and floating above other windows, and a click on its title to rename the note.

⌥⌘↓ shows or hides the pinned note from anywhere, independent of the icon click.

Auto-hide

Settings → General has a toggle to automatically hide Envy the moment you click into a different app or an empty part of the screen, Spotlight-style, for anyone who wants it to disappear as readily as it appears.

Your notes are just files

Nothing about Envy locks your notes into a proprietary format. Every note is plain markdown text you can open, edit, back up, or sync with any other tool you already use, whether that's Dropbox, iCloud Drive, git, or nothing at all.